It’s something most women are guilty of. “I feel fat,” one will declare after a meal, no matter its size, to which her friend might reply, “God, if you think you’re fat, what about me?”

Fat talk, the everyday negative and body-disparaging comments and conversations between women about eating, weight and body shape (“I hate my thighs”, “She’s so thin!”) is fuelled by women who put more importance on physical appearance and attractiveness and who feel pressure to achieve the “perfect” body, suggests a new study exploring why women do it.

The findings shouldn’t be seen as any kind of judgment reaction, they and other researchers stress. It’s difficult, as a woman in this culture, to not be worried about how you look.

But fat talk has an extra element of perniciousness, because it feeds into the culture that creates it.

“Women who overhear others engage in fat talk are more likely to fat talk themselves and to experience heightened body dissatisfaction and guilt,” University of Ottawa researchers write in the most recent issue of the journal Body Image.

Like it or not, we still live in a culture where women are taught that how they look matters more than anything else about them

Fat talk occurs among women of all ages and all body types and women often engage in it to receive “validation or re-affirmation that their bodies are appealing,” they said.

“It’s done with the purpose of fishing, or trying to understand what people think of you, or perceive of you,” said co-author Luc Pelletier, a professor and social psychologist at the University of Ottawa.

In fact, “conversational shaming of the body” has become so pervasive, it’s “practically a ritual of womanhood (though men also engage in it),” Northwestern University psychologist Renee Engeln wrote last year in the New York Times. That occurred after Facebook ditched its pillow-cheeked “feeling fat” emoticon when thousands signed an online petition posted by Endangeredbodies.org, an initiative that exists to “challenge all those merchants of body hatred who turn girls and women against their own bodies.”

Many women who engage in fat talk have internalized an “ideal” (usually ultra-thin) body image perpetuated by the media, Pelletier said. “Some women become vulnerable to the images that are portrayed, while others are able to resist them,” he said.

For their study, the Ottawa researchers applied the “self-determination theory,” a basic theory of human motivation. The theory holds that people are motivated by either intrinsic (personal growth) or extrinsic (popularity, physical attractiveness, social status) goals.

Intrinsic goals are associated with better health and wellbeing, while extrinsic goals have been tied to lower self-esteem, higher depression, anxiety and stringent exercising and dieting.

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Their sample included 453 female undergrads aged 17 to 50 who completed an online questionnaire. According to their BMI, or body mass index, 69 per cent were in the normal range, while 20 per cent were overweight or obese (11 per cent were underweight).

Most said they sometimes engaged in fat talk, but women who were more motivated by extrinsic goals — to “be beautiful” or “be admired by many people” — were more likely to do it.

“Looking thin and looking good respond to those goals, compared to others’ goals of being healthy,” Pelletier said.

The fat talkers were also more “non-self-determined,” which Pelletier described as women “who don’t regulate their behaviours themselves, who feel pressured or coerced to do something” in order to please others. They were also more likely to engage in unhealthy eating — focusing on calories to lose weight and be thin.

Self-determined women who are more likely to reject sociocultural pressures to pursue an idealist body image were less likely to engage in negative body talk, they found. “Some women prefer conversing with other women who speak more positively about their bodies, compared to women who tend to self-degrade about their bodies,” they write.

Despite the link between fat talk and body dissatisfaction, other studies have found that fat talk, in a rather twisted way, can make women feel better.

In a study reported by Engeln and her colleagues in 2011, “The most common response to fat talk was denial that the friend was fat, most typically leading to a back-and-forth conversation where each of two healthy weight peers denies the other is fat while claiming to be fat themselves.”

In an interview, Engeln said the Ottawa study is consistent with what was known about the “objectification” of women, “which tells us the more we worry about how we look, the more we can have all sorts of negative outcomes.”

“Like it or not, we still live in a culture where women are taught that how they look matters more than anything else about them,” she said. “Which, in this culture, means being thin”

Talking about it with other people would normally be seen as a good coping strategy, she said. But fat talk is different.

“We have evidence fat talk makes it worse, not just for you but for people who hear you doing it. Because the more you hear it, the more you think about your body.”